Hospitality, listening, revelation. These are the steps that lead to mutual understanding, but also to a greater awareness of self and the human that is in each one. It is no coincidence that hospitality has a sacred value both in the Bible and the Koran. Because it is through it that God reveals himself. Don Giuliano Savina, director of the CEI National Office for ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, dialogues with Father Jihad Yousef, rector of the monastery of Mar Musa El-Habashi, founded north of Damascus by Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, “To look for”, explains Pierluigi Milesi, who coordinates the meeting, “to enter this great category of reception, which is the figure of our chair, through the profound experience of the meeting between the faiths”. In Sacrofano, after discussed the challenges and prospects of the reception, with the community of Sant’Egidio, of remission of the debt, with the rector of Lateranse, Alfonso Amrarante and with Umberto Triulzi, of social and planetary justice, with Monica di Sisto, Mauro Magatti and Andrea Pase, are silent and four candles come on. “A symbol to say that we also want to turn on a light within us, a fire, a reference, a human warmth”, explains Milesi. Because, adds Don Savina, “If it is true that every religion leads to God, it is also true that every religion has the human point as its common point”. And to make him emerge, to dialogue, he underlines Father Youssef, it is necessary to “go helpful to others. By departing the weapons that are the prejudices, the hearsy, the old experiences, the historical difficulties. Let’s go there, on the other, with a huge desire to be filled by God that we find by them and to testify God who is in us “.
Don Savina remembers an Ethiopian boy, who arrived on the boats, who “always went around with an envelope. I intrigued myself and one day I asked him what he had in that envelope that he never left. Inside there was a Bible “, the priest recalls that” he was a Bible, not a comment. We have to return to the word, be anchored there “. And explains the Abraham pass that welcomes three foreigners in his tent and, in welcoming them, in reality, he welcomes God.
A dialogue that descends into the bowels, that explains and interrogates. Until the final blessing, with Don Savina who returns to the episode of Moses and the Ardent Rovetus, «to, revelation precisely, when God says to Moses: “Now go because I listened to the cry of the people”. And then this is my prayer: “Lord reply, you have already answered us in the passion and resurrection of Christ and continue to respond to us in his passion death and resurrection. But this pain is severe, we need you “».
“I too would like to shout to the Lord, not only to invite him to listen,” adds Father Youssef. «Lord, I cry to you, in the name of my country, Syria, who had a boulder stone on her chest for more than 54 years. This stone of injustice, terror, torture, prisons, slaughterhouses, took off, was removed. But the ribs of my country, Syria, are broken and as soon as it manages to breathe, “says the monk. And then he invokes the “Lord, in the name of the mothers who have lost their children, their husbands, of the women who have lost their brothers, of the men who have lost their children, their friends. I send you in the name of the children of Gaza who are now dying under the Israeli bombs And none of the powerful in the world wants to make an act of opposition, an honest act. He listens to the cry of the thousands and thousands of young people, hundreds of thousands in the squares of the world, in Tel Aviv, now, in these days, against Netanyahu and its government. Of the children in Sudan, in Yemen, Africa, Ukraine, Russia. Lord, your people can’t take it anymore. You who are omnipotent, who are the merciful, please transform our hearts into human hearts and make us choose forever and everywhere, at every price, the good because it is good, not because it should be convenient. The good because it is beautiful, because you are our good and praise you and glory for all centuries of the centuries. Amen”.
